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With My Face to the Enemy: Perspectives on the Civil War by Robert Cowley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Anthology of essays about the American Civil War from MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. As is to be expected, they vary in quality, but the good ones---like James M. McPherson's essay about Grant---are very good.

(I think the editor is wrong to call Raphael Semmes, the captain of the CSS Alabama, a "genuine American hero" (429), first because Semmes was a traitor---I know the Confederates had many arguments to prove that they weren't traitors, and I don't buy any of them, especially not for men who were in the US armed services before secession---and second because, while he achieved amazing things, he achieved them in support of the Confederacy and therefore in support of chattel slavery. I ask myself whether, say, Frederick Douglass would have called Semmes a "genuine American hero," and the answer is a resounding no. I think in talking about the Civil War it's important not to keep erasing the subject position of Black people, and one of the things that means is that your definition of "American" can't have a hidden (white) in front of it. I feel the same way about the essay on Sheridan and its enthusiasm for his victories against the Native American tribes he persecuted. I digress, but it's, unfortunately, the thing about the book that is staying with me most vividly.)

Overall, none of the less good essays were terrible, and the good ones made the book worth reading.

Three and a half stars, round up to four.




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ROSENCRANTZ: Boring!
GUILDENSTERN: I beg your pardon?
ROSENCRANTZ: You're boring!
GUILDENSTERN: I beg your pardon.
ROSENCRANTZ: You're boring, I'm boring, the entire world is boring boring boring.
GUILDENSTERN: Waiting for the edit letter?
ROSENCRANTZ: YES.

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A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom by David Williams

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Socialist-lens history of the American Civil War, with particular attention paid to how many white people in the South actually DIDN'T want secession and how many white people in the North DIDN'T want war, but also a good chapter on what Black people were willing to do to gain their freedom. Also a chapter on the genocide of the Native Americans that kept going strong between 1861 and 1865. And points out that after the war, the same white people were in power both North and South that had been in power before.



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Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic by Sarah Gilbreath Ford

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Literary criticism, focusing on the link between slavery and the gothic: "Just as the American dream of working your way to success is evidenced by property, the American nightmare that your success was stolen from others is evidenced by haunted property. The dream house with the picket fence and the haunted house with broken windows are part of the same narrative" (5). For the most part I found this a very solid piece of work, carefully thought through and carefully written. (I object a little bit to labeling Octavia Butler a "postmodern" writer because she writes about time travel, but on the other hand, whatever keeps people reading her books, and the chapter on Kindred and Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard: A Pulitzer Prize Winner---which I now need to find and read---is a good chapter.)

My favorite observation: "Characters often make stupid decisions in gothic narratives because they do not perceive that they are in a gothic narrative" (80). This explains just about every horror movie ever made.



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Robert E. Lee: A Life by Allen C. Guelzo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I like Allen C. Guelzo. He's a bit of an iconoclast,* he writes beautifully, and he has produced what seems to me a very even-handed and fair biography of Robert E. Lee (who himself never went by "Robert E. Lee"). Unlike Pryor in Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, Guelzo is not charmed by Lee, and he does not write hagiography, but he isn't as committed to disassembling Lee as either Nolan (Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History) or Fellman (The Making of Robert E. Lee). He gives a portrait of a flawed human being (with tremendous charisma) who made bad decisions, and he is not shy about saying Lee committed treason.

Lee continues to fascinate me. He, like Stonewall Jackson, remains compelling even though I don't like him and I don't admire him. Guelzo pins Lee's psychology on his father, Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee, who deserted the family when Robert was six, and says that Lee's life was a struggle between the desires for independence and security and the overwhelming need to be perfect. I'm a little skeptical of tidy biographical schemas (and really, aren't all of us struggling to balance the desire for independence with the desire for security?), but Guelzo uses his well to explore Lee's relationship to the U.S. Army, to his Custis in-laws, and especially to Arlington, the house that his wife and children loved passionately, but that seems to have hung around Lee's neck like an albatross. He talks very carefully about Lee's decision to give his service to the Confederacy, and he does a good job of explaining Lee's career as a battlefield general, without either undercutting or overselling his accomplishments. (Yes, Lee achieved amazing results, but he did so at a terrible cost of human life, and really, he looks amazing because he's up against some really terrible generals.) He argues that Lee found the balance he needed at Washington and Lee University (contrary to Pryor, who says he felt trapped there), but was sabotaged by his failing health. This leaves us with Robert E. Lee as a person who was never really happy because nothing was ever perfect enough. (Certainly, no man was perfect enough for his daughters. None of the four ever married, and it's at least in part because Lee (a) froze out their suitors and (b) encouraged them to think that they could never find a man as perfect as their father. Also, of course, the Civil War swinging like a scythe through the men of their generation.) And that's sad, but it's also maybe no more than he deserved.

Overall, I found this biography compellingly readable, and found that it, like Gwynne's Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, left me feeling like I could see clearly the irreducible knot at the center of its subject's personality and life.

Five stars

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* He thinks Gettysburg was bad generalship on Lee's part, not good generalship on Meade's. He thinks Lee's strategy of invading the North was better than the strategy (which the Confederacy failed to follow in any event) of a purely defensive war. He thinks Lincoln was wrong to say that Lee's army had to be the target, not Richmond.



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The American Civil War: A Military History by John Keegan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book is uneven. Most of it is what the subtitle promises, a military history of the American Civil War, but at the end it devolves into a collection of random essays on the Civil War. I observe from the copyright page that "portions of this book originally appeared in The Civil War Times and Military History Quarterly," and that's what they read like: magazine articles that have a set word limit and thus only so much space to delve into their subjects, with the result that these chapters feel superficial and, as I said, random---there's one about Whitman, and one about Black soldiers, and one on "the home fronts," which includes a paean to Southern womanhood (or perhaps I mean Southern Womanhood) that I found so bizarre it is going to be one of my lasting memories of the book.

Which is a pity, because most of the book is extremely interesting. John Keegan was, of course, the great English military historian, and his view of the Civil War is fascinating, both because he is, obviously, not American and looks at the progress of the war with a detachment that American historians, even now, do not have. (He is also the first historian I've read who buys Major General Dan Sickles's argument (promoted tirelessly after the fact) that he was the hero of Gettysburg for disobeying orders on the 2nd day.) But also because he really is writing a military history and thus spends a lot of time talking about geography, particularly rivers, in a way I had not thought about before. Keegan has ensured that I will now think of the Civil War as a war about rivers---the Mississippi, most obviously, and the Tennessee and the Cumberland and the Ohio, but also the Rappahannock and the Rapidan and that series of parallel rivers between Washington and Richmond.

So three and a half stars, round up to four.



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Connecticut Witch Trials: The First Panic in the New World by Cynthia Wolfe Boynton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I have a couple of books with a little bit of a chip on their shoulder about Connecticut's witch trials being unfairly overshadowed by Salem. Granted, it's hard to look away from Salem, but part of the reason for this, as I think Cynthia Wolfe Boynton had to grapple with in writing this book, is that we know so much more about Salem's witches than we do about Connecticut's witches, and there are, of course, more of them. So this is a very skinny book and it's clearly taking up room with whatever it can, including Durer engravings and illustrations from nineteenth century works about, ironically, Salem. It needed a better copy-editor (someone who would catch the use of "ancestors" when what was meant was "descendants" and, my favorite typo, The Witch of Blackboard Pond). The prose is good, but the book is not very well organized, which I think again has something to do with the skimpiness of the material. Not all of its sources are reliable---or even worth quoting (the imaginative description of an imaginary witchcraft trial from Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly in 1881 that makes the glaring error of having the female suspect searched for witch's teats by MEN, like, why is this even HERE?).

Two and a half stars, round up to three.




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The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Famous book about healing trauma, organized around the apparently radical notion that trauma causes long-term problems, physical as well as mental. Van der Kolk is an engaging writer, excellent at making individual patients both vivid persons and useful examples (both these things are necessary in a book like this). He also describes the various treatment types (EMDR, IFS, neurofeedback, yoga, etc.) clearly and succinctly, and makes a persuasive case that the first thing we ALL need is awareness of self and awareness of body.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War by Ernest B. Furgurson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Biography of Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War. This is not as good a book as Nelson Lankford's Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital, but it offers a panoramic view of Richmond and a good sense of what the Civil War looked like from that geographic and political position. Most of Furguson's sources are, inevitably, white Richmonders and (at the end) white Yankees. I would have liked to have seen more discussion of Black viewpoints, even if only by unpacking more carefully what the white people wrote, but by and large Furguson is not really interested in unpacking what his sources say; his project is clearly to synthesize his array of sources into a coherent narrative.



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The White Tecumseh: A Biography of General William T. Sherman by Stanley P. Hirshson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a mediocre biography of William Tecumseh Sherman. I was hoping (expecting?) that the title was being used ironically, or at least with self-awareness or at LEAST quoting something said about Sherman during his lifetime, and nope. So that's cringeworthy. Otherwise, Hirshon seems to be an honest biographer, not trying to cover over any of the giant flaws in Sherman's character, and following his subject faithfully through pre-Civil War, Civil War, and post-Civil War life. He's just not a very interesting writer (it's possible he comes off particularly badly against Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, which is the book I finished immediately prior). This book plodded along from birth to death.

It's a pity, because Sherman himself was such a firecracker of a person, exploding here in a nervous breakdown, there in a fantastically ill-advised attempt to dictate terms, not just to Johnston and the Confederates, but to the Union government in Washington D.C. And of course burning Atlanta and marching through Georgia. "War is cruelty," he said at one point (also "War is hell"), and for someone who does not seem to have been particularly self-aware, he understood war in a searingly honest way that few generals on either side did. (Grant did. Jackson did.) Sherman was also appallingly racist (although not more racist than a lot of other white Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century), and is one of the many white men who should not be forgiven for their treatment of Native Americans. (When your opinion is, "Yes, well, it's a pity we're committing genocide but (a) it has to happen and (b) they asked for it," you really need to sit down and think about your choices, which of course Sherman never did.) He was also a petty bitch (egged on by his wife, whom I disliked immensely) and a father of a rather selfish stripe. (When his elder surviving son decided to become a Jesuit instead of a lawyer, Sherman took it as a personal, devastating insult and swore enmity to the Catholic Church. He seemed to feel that Tom OWED it to him to become a lawyer and it just unhinged him that Tom was determined to do something else.)

So a rather boring biography about an interesting person.



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